Rhinocrisy

So, those of you who are over thirty (anyone? anyone?) might remember the war on pornography prosecuted under the Reagan Administration, under the stern eye of Attorney General Edwin Meese III and his famous Commission. I don’t remember this, but that’s okay, since I can just watch it play out again today. Via 100 monkeys typing, we learn that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is fashioning an anti-obscenity squad composed of FBI agents.^*

Even if you do NOT recall, I trust most of you are familiar with the reaction of feminists to the Meese commission. That is, many feminists chose to side with the conservative Christian right and their censoriousness in decrying pornography, on the grounds that pornography was chauvinist and hateful towards women. The Meese commission, in fact, concluded that pornography promotes rape and sexual abuse. Many parties concluded that the Meese commission was full of shit and would have said just about any sort of lie in order to prove its point, and the fact that, you know, they didn’t actually perform any studies, and in fact brought in experts^† to contradict actual studies that had been performed. However, many radical feminists of the Andrea Dworkin school of thought apparently didn’t attend those parties and continued to quote Meese’s bogus “research” favorably.

Andrea Dworkin is now dead, however, and hopefully others of her ilk are as well. This time, if a war flares up, I’m hoping feminists will ally themselves in favor of free speech and, well, sex. I happen to think being pro-sex is actually quite feminist, for reasons I think I’ve sketched out before. Women should be taking firmer control over their own sexuality (ideally with both hands). There’s certainly more room for this in a sexually liberal society than there is in a conservative one. On the other hand, the idea that women can’t have sex without being victimized (which is essentially what an anti-porn stance amounts to) seems decidedly non-feminist to me.

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^* We are late, as usual, on this observation, but the appeal of this blog has never been its timeliness. Or its trenchant insights, its wit or even its prolificacy. In fact, this blog has no appeal whatsoever.

^† Sexperts? How often do you actually get to use that term? Okay, I know it’s not a real term. I already told you this blog lacks wit.

Apropos of nothing, check out this video of a guy doing push-ups with a raw egg under each hand. Holy cannoli.

Incidentally, this reminds me of things you should NOT do:

Once I was at a party with a very good friend of mine. I told him how great the integrity of an egg is, and how it was essentially impossible to crush it in one’s hand. He expressed skepticism, so we went to the fridge and got an egg. He held it over the sink while I watched him try and crush it.

Now, the reason an egg cannot be crushed by human hands is because of its dome shape. This distributes pressure efficiently across the surface, so that only by a very, very great force or by concentration of force on a single point can you crack the egg. The normal human hand cannot do this, simply because of the way the fingers wrap around it. However, if you have long fingers with oddly-shaped knuckles, it’s possible to apply enough force at a single point to crack the egg. Continued application will result in catastrophic collapse, sending yolk and egg whites squirting out across any bystanding friend’s kurta-payjama.

This now goes on the list of Really Stupid Things I Will Never Live Down, along with that time I tipped over my kayak in the Charles River (”It’s nearly impossible to tip a kayak,” I told my brother. “Watch!”), and that time I took the bus the wrong way home from Arsenal Mall.